Drawing on its extensive IT services capabilities, Xerox is the lastest big-name technology vendor to begin provisioning a series of cloud service focused on small and midsize businesses.

The services will be sold by the company's army of VARs and business partners, and they are explicitly "priced" to focus on SMBs with between $10 million and $150 million in revenue. So, if you are smaller, they might seem a little dear, I suppose. In fact, the descriptions seem much more focused on midsize companies, if you ask me.

The services include:

Xerox Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for midrange and Intel systems; the focus is on being able to support legacy enterprise resource planning applications and environments with multiple operating systems.

Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Service; the pitch is that data, applications and operating systems can all be restored in less than 24 hours. The data that your organization stores in the cloud will be backed up replicated, secured and encrypted on a daily basis.

What makes the Xerox offerings more appealing to an SMB that, say, one from cloud IaaS leaders such as Amazon or Rackspace? I haven't seen all the pricing comparisons, but perhaps the most significant differentiation is that Xerox is using the capabilities of its service provider arm Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), which it bought in 2010. That means its offering is more akin to those coming out of IBM's services unit, meaning that an SMB will probably have more resources for dealing with the management and integration challenges that come from layering cloud services into an existing infrastructure. With organizations such as Amazon, you tend to be more on your own when it comes to technical support.

Thank You

By registering you become a member of the CBS Interactive family of sites and you have read and agree to the Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Video Services Policy. You agree to receive updates, alerts and promotions from CBS and that CBS may share information about you with our marketing partners so that they may contact you by email or otherwise about their products or services.
You will also receive a complimentary subscription to the ZDNet's Tech Update Today and ZDNet Announcement newsletters. You may unsubscribe from these newsletters at any time.